Tom Chivers is the Telegraph's assistant comment editor. He writes mainly on science. Not a poet - that's the other Tom Chivers. Read older posts by Tom here.

All this hyperbole in politics is worse than murder

Can we all establish one thing? Workfare is not "slave labour". It might be the right way to get people into work, as m'colleague the Mayor of London says, or it may be an ugly way of providing major corporations with taxpayer-funded staff, as m'colleague Dan Knowles says. It may be both. There is a legitimate argument over whether it's the right thing to do. I don't think it is – I find the idea of the state providing Tesco with free man-hours a bit strange – but I'm not an economist.

But it's not sodding "slave labour" and it is downright silly to say that it is. Slaves, actual slaves, were uprooted from their families and dragged from one continent to another to do backbreaking labour for no pay, and were often killed if they ran away. Pretending that getting people who are being paid benefits to do work experience, and being given the option of quitting in their first week, is in some way comparable is just weird.

I say this because this ludicrous hyperbole is endemic in our public debate. As we've just seen, the Left do it. So do the Right, with talk of "PC fascists", "eco-Nazis", "Feminazis", "militant atheists".

And, I should admit, I do it. I recently tweeted a link to a story about the (deeply unpleasant) bill which was proposed in Virginia – now passed with amendments which made it somewhat less hideous - which would have forced women seeking an abortion to have a transvaginal ultrasound; that is, to have a probe put inside their vagina. I repeated the story's claim that this was "rape". Now, it is a vile thing to insist upon, and it is bullying, and medically unnecessary, and it has horrible sexual overtones. But I can imagine that women who have suffered actual rape would take issue with me. The Virginian bill was repellent enough without inflating the language.

The trouble is that all this bloviating is, by any sensible measure, counter-productive. Screaming "IT'S SLAVE LABOUR" (or "IT'S RAPE" or "BARACK OBAMA IS LITERALLY HITLER") gets a big cheer from the people you agree with, but makes everyone on the other side, or in the undecided camp, think you're an idiot. If we're trying to convince people who don't already agree with us, which presumably we are, then it's a stupid thing to do.

The Nazis, slavery, rape and fascism are unimaginably horrible things. Something can be very, very wrong indeed and still not be as bad as them.